Email sent out to all County Clerks and WISE-LR Administrators on September 22, 2011
Dear County Clerk and/or WISE-LR Administrator,
The statutory deadline for local redistricting has now passed. As of this past Monday September 19th, all final ward & supervisory plans should have been submitted into the Wisconsin State Legislature. We would like to thank everyone for their participation and efforts in the local redistricting process. If you have already submitted your county-wide ward plan and your supervisory district plan through WISE-LR, you may disregard the remainder of this email.
If you have not already submitted your final plans, we ask that you complete this process as soon as possible. The Legislature provides the data collected during this process to the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board (GAB) which gets put into their Statewide Voter Registration System (SVRS). Any questions on the process of getting this new ward information into the SVRS system should be directed to the GAB staff.
If you need to approve your county-wide ward plan, please follow these simple steps:
1. Login as the Admin (use your County_Admin account and password).
2. Before approving your plan, make sure that ALL blocks are assigned in your county. Also, if a municipality in your county does not have to be split, please assign it to “Ward 1” (this part would need to first be done when signed in as County_User).
3. Click on the “Tools” tab.
4. Scroll down to the “Approve Plan” section.
5. Enter your name, e-mail and ordinance or resolution number in the spaces provided (if you don’t have an ordinance or resolution number, any number will work).
6. Hit the “Approve Plan” button. This sends the Legislative GIS team an email that your county has been approved.
Please visit http://legis.wisconsin.gov/wiselr/faqs.htm for more information about WISE-LR and steps to take to approve plans and make assignments.
Contact Information
Michael Keane – Legislative Reference Bureau – Michael.Keane@legis.wi.gov – 608-266-0346
Tony J. Van Der Wielen – Legislative Technology Services Bureau – gis@legis.wi.gov, tony.vanderwielen@legis.wi.gov – 608-266-6640 Ext. 1.
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to let any of us know.
Thank you,
Tony J. Van Der Wielen
LRB Legislative Brief relating to Local Redistricting Re-Adjustments: http://legis.wisconsin.gov/lrb/pubs/Lb/11Lb1.pdf
Map of Approved Supervisory Plans (Updated on 8/9/11)
Map of Approved Wards (Updated on 9/9/11)
Report of Cities, Towns and Villages Required to Create Wards (as of 9/9/11)
The History of WISE-LR
Back in 2000, WISE-LR allowed counties and municipalities to create new ward, supervisory, and aldermanic plans as part of their redistricting effort, replacing the WISLR program used in the 1990 redistricting project.
The WISE-LR application proved to be very successful for the redistricting project.
The Wisconsin Legislature is appreciative of the many counties and municipalities who participated in the redistricting project and used the WISE-LR application. Through the use of the WISE-LR application, the legislature was able to collect the current ward boundaries for almost every county, as well as most of the current supervisory and aldermanic districts. This data proved invaluable to the success of the 2001 Legislative Redistricting Project.
What is WISE-LR?
WISE for Local Redistricting was created by the Wisconsin Legislative Technology Services Bureau, the University of Wisconsin-Madison Applied Population Laboratory and the Wisconsin Legislative Reference Bureau.
WISE-LR is a simple to use online local redistricting tool that can be utilized to quickly and easily create county supervisory, aldermanic and municipal ward boundaries. The application will use U.S. Census Bureau's 2010 tabulation blocks merged with Census 2010 population totals. WISE-LR was built specifically to help counties meet a statutory requirement to submit municipal ward information to the Legislature.
Help Us Build WISE-LR
The WISE-LR Pilot program began in April of 2010 and concluded in September of 2010. WISE-LR gave counties an opportunity to use the online application before its final release on April 1, 2011.
This program gave counties the opportunity to:
· Test features of the new software.
· Assess the support and training materials that will be provided.
· Make enhancement suggestions.
As an added benefit for participation in the WISE-LR Pilot program, counties had the opportunity to have assignments made in the pilot program made available in the final release of the software.